About a year and a half ago I set myself a challenge: to transcribe as many a capella folk songs as possible, and produce a songbook.
I’d been toying with the idea for a while: teenage me had been enraptured by the arrangements of Folly Bridge and Finest Kind, and had transcribed a few to see what made them tick. I’d even coerced some friends into singing them with me when I was teaching at Southampton University’s folk society!
Then, last summer, I found myself with significant free time on my hands, and decided to make a true go of it. Some 46 folk songs later, and I have a songbook!
What’s in the songbook?
But before I produced a songbook, I had to decide what went in it! So I set myself some guidelines:
Mixed voice parts
Given the popularity of male-voice shanty choirs, it would have been incredibly easy to fill the entire book with nothing but shanties for tenors and basses. However, I wanted to sing these songs with rag-tag groups of friends, so the arrangements had to be a bit more flexible than that! I chose to focus on songs which had both upper and lower voices, and, where possible, included songs for only upper voices (to counteract the abundance of songs for lower voices).
No already published sheet music
Some of the groups of interest for my songbook already sell their own songbooks. A good example is The Longest Johns, who very successfully sell the sheet music to almost all of their arrangements. This project was just me having fun, so transcribing out sheet music that already exists is both a waste of my time, and a good way to step on people’s intellectual property.
Mixed group sizes
In the process of my transcription, I found that trios are the most common group size for folk a capella. I love this sound, and how it differentiates folk from classical music’s long history of 4-part writing. However, it also isn’t very flexible to random groups of people, so I went out of my way to find arrangement from more varied group sizes where possible (trios still make up the majority of my transcriptions though!)
Performances
I and the choral scholars at St David’s Cathedral have performed several numbers from this book on the St David’s Cathedral Youtube Channel.
Availability
The songbook is not currently available anywhere. To get it available I’d have to go through a number of copyright hurdles, which I certainly don’t have the knowledge for at the moment.
What next?
Now I have a solid foundation and proof-of-concept, I am beginning to contact music publishing houses, to see if they have any interest taking this commercial. Because of all the copyright shenanigans involved in publishing a compilation book, I probably wouldn’t be able to publish this on my own, so without backing the book won’t go further than occasional dinner-parties with folky friends.
Beyond that I might also upload some performances of songs from it to my Youtube channel, or some transcription videos. In fact, my 2nd video, “Hush My Babe”, is just a short song from this book, played on the bassoon.
I of course intend to keep transcribing whatever happens, and get together with more people to sing these great arrangements!
lankfish 
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